Tell Him About It
by Zayz
Summary: LJ. "To me, love is a many layered, many coloured, many legged thing, and I don’t think I can express mine through a Quaffle to his abdomen, if you know what I mean." Lily shares some insight on how she told James Potter she loved him. T for 1 word. R&R?


**A/N: Very loosely based around the ideas behind the song 'Tell Her About It' by Billy Joel. Basically, this is a Lily Evans rant/story telling you how to tell the love of your life that you care about him – told kind of in second person. Written while avoiding Geography homework.**

**And – Sweeney Todd has been around in literary works since the 1800's, in case you period-sticklers want to know.**

**Enjoy, and as always, review!**

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Telling a boy you love him is bloody horrible.

This is coming from someone who knows. I could be a professor on the subject if I wanted to be. Professor Lily Evans at your service. But really, telling a boy you love him is probably one of the hardest things you will ever do in your entire lifetime, because as aforementioned, it's bloody _horrible_.

The worst, and hardest, part of the ordeal (at least in my experience) is probably planning how to do it and when to do it. Getting it done is actually the easy part, because you already have a plan.

But when you're still making that plan with a group of girls who have different, and horrendous, ideas on how to get you together with the boy in question, then things can get kind of painful.

You've just got all these different angles and aspects with which to work the situation! One of them wants you to go intimate and mushy-like-soggy-Cheerios-spat-out-by-a-three-year-old – a tragic, heart-rending love letter, flowers, chocolate etc.

Gross.

Another wants you to be bold – snog him passionately in the middle of the Great Hall just before lunch in front of every bloody person in the school.

Even worse.

A third wants you to keep it to yourself until the very last second, at which point you bluntly tell him, "Look, boy, I like you." Then you run, because you don't want him to respond – you just want him to know and be done with it.

That leaves way too much room for a chicken like me to flee the scene.

And then there are the very special, very precious young ladies who have ideas of romance that make you question how on earth they are ever going to find themselves married. I've heard it all from that population: taping a note asking him out to a Quaffle which you chuck at him during Quidditch practice, using vibrant, perverted pick up lines (ex. "Like my homework, I just want to take you up to my room tonight and do you for hours no end"), and my personal favourite, wearing a low-cut 'I love (insert crush's name here – in my case James Potter)' shirt around school.

It's astounding how they think you'll have those kinds of guts.

I, of course, don't like any of those methods of revelation. Let's think logically here: how can you reveal love in those trifling, silly little tactics?

To me, love is a many layered, many coloured, many legged thing, and I don't think _I _can express mine through a Quaffle to his abdomen, if you know what I mean.

So how do you tell this poor, bumbling, oblivious boy that you have ardent, wholesome, and utterly zealous feelings for him, for reasons you can't even identify? Especially if he's a little too thick in the head, and a little too arrogant when he does understand what you're trying to say?

It's a difficult question to answer, and I know that all too well, but it has to be possible. It must be. If you're like me, and believe in fate making everything happen for a reason, then you know that this is only par for the course – there _is _a way, but you just haven't found it.

It's now, I find, at this point of finding yourself back at square one after all this difficult introspective work, that you decide to finally just screw it. You'll answer the question yourself, and you'll do what your gut tells you to do in the actual situation.

After all, your genius friends are not the ones who know your feelings, or are going to end up doing the deed here – it's going to be you, and only you, so you might as well do what _you_ feel is right.

When the moment came for me to go to James Potter and tell him I loved him, I remember that every single piece of last-nanosecond advice my best girlfriends gave me flew right out of my left ear. I was blank, left only with myself, and the boy sitting across from me in the Gryffindor common room during a free period.

Gryffindors were milling about, working or talking or both, but they were irrelevant to me – the only person I had eyes for was James. If I let the others psyche me out, I would never get this done.

So, siphoning and coaxing and clutching onto as much strength from inside of me as I could, I marched over to that raven-haired, olive-golden-mahogany-eyed boy, and I tapped him on the shoulder.

He looked up at me, his sweetly crafted features spelling out his confusion only too clearly seeing as I don't usually voluntarily speak to him, and he asked me, "What?"

It wasn't rude or anything, it was just a question-word. 'What?'

I bit my lip when I heard this single word, and I said, "I have something to tell you."

Needless to say, I wanted to kill myself right then for my ambiguity.

"Yes?" he asked me again.

What was it with him and single-word answers? It was killing me; oh, if only he knew.

"Okay, look…erm…"

I groped for the words inside my head. They were not in the mood to be found. Damn. I stuttered a bit, and tried to look for them, but it was all in vain – they simply did not _want_ to be found. Did this always have to happen to me?

He was patient though, waiting for me to speak. So, finally, I just burst out with, "James Potter, I am fucking in love with you!"

And then there was silence. Pure silence.

The entire common room had heard me. They were all watching, stunned, as I stood there, watching him for his reaction. His expression was frozen, appropriate for being bludgeoned over the head with the club of a troll – again, I wanted to kill myself, but this time for my daring. What was wrong with me?

But, my misery didn't last long; because, about thirty seconds later, he bursts out laughing.

Full-out, tears-in-his-eyes, so-hard-you-can't-hear-it laughing.

(Side note: If your crush starts laughing at you when you tell him you love him, I'm so sorry. He deserves to actually be bludgeoned over the head with the club of a troll if so, because after my familiarity with the ordeal, no girl in the world – with a few exceptions – deserves such a fate.)

I couldn't believe him. Truly, I couldn't.

Here I was, admitting the biggest truth of my life to the only boy who matters so much in front of the whole house here after he's spent years attempting to make me say such a thing, and then he laughs at me!

I wanted to melt through the floor and slash his neck with a scythe – or a razor, taking a leaf out of Sweeney Todd's book.

However, I could not; I could only stand there, in sheer incredulity, as James wiped away his tears and finished laughing at me.

"That isn't funny at _all_," I told him, indignant.

"Yes it was," he said, giggling weakly as he cleaned his glasses and put them back on.

I continued to stare at him, unsure of whether or not to be annoyed, and he smiled that jack-o'-lantern grin of his back at me.

Then he stood up and said, "And even though I've known it forever, it's about bloody time you told me yourself."

I grimaced. "Arrogant bastard."

"That's me." With this – and another twitch of his lips to show me his amusement – he leaned forward, and he kissed me.

You heard me right; he did kiss me – planted a big, wet one, right on my about-to-articulate-a-contradiction mouth.

Yes; he managed to pick up instinctively on the only action whose daring could even come close to match my own, much to the applause and entertainment of the people around us.

Truly, this boy is something else.

So now, a couple of months after that incident and that first kiss, I can now still say that telling the boy you love that you did commit the sin of loving him is bloody horrible.

It's embarrassing – it leaves you so vulnerable in the wake of a boy who will most likely abuse your newfound softness.

Your friends are about as horrible as the event, because they not only remind you relentlessly about the way you looked and all the stressing that went into planning the confession, they also start coming up with baby names and a wedding guest list for you.

While getting it done was easy in the moment, the aftermath is usually the wake-up call – the post-ball Cinderella, if you will. The fact that your newfound boy toy is on your side is probably the only good thing that comes out of the whole tribulation, because it's now that you lose what little privacy you did have to the rest of your very interested school-mates.

But, I must say; in the end, if you're like me, then the good still – somehow – manages to outweigh all the bad.


End file.
